Men of Honour (36 page)

A decade after the battle, Wordsworth, in his
Thanksgiving Odes
, written to celebrate the final victory over Napoleon at Waterloo, would address the God he was thanking for the victory.

Thy most dreaded instrument,

In working out a pure intent,

Is Man—arrayed for mutual slaughter,—

Yea, Carnage is thy daughter!

The slaughter of these wars was seen by Wordsworth as divine virtue at work. ‘Carnage is God's daughter' was a phrase which shocked his more radical contemporaries, but
it would find sympathetic echoes in 19th-century England. Thomas de Quincey agreed that ‘among God's holiest instruments for the elevation of human nature is “mutual slaughter” amongst men'. De Quincey thought war allowed man to breathe ‘a transcendent atmosphere' and to experience ‘an idea that else would perish: viz. The idea of mixed crusade and martyrdom, doing and suffering, that finds its realisation in battle.' The disgusting reality of war—the rolling of the corpses in the mastless hulks during the Trafalgar storm, the blood making its patterns on the deal planks of the decks, the quantities of whitewash needed to obscure the bloodstains on the orlop decks of every ship, the spattering of men's faces with the remains of their friends, the actual appearance of the terrible splinter wounds—that becomes obscured under the sublime and theatrical beauties and the exquisite moral drama of distant violence.

Such a conception of war became the Victorian orthodoxy. For Ruskin, war itself was the foundation of beauty. ‘There is no great art possible to a nation but that which is based on battle,' he told a London audience in 1865. It was a frame of mind which drew on the theatrics of Trafalgar, a celebration of what Ruskin called ‘creative, or foundational war',

in which the natural restlessness and love of contest among men are disciplined, by consent, into modes of beautiful—though it may be fatal—play…To such war as this all men are born; in such war as this any man may happily die; and out of such war as this have arisen throughout the extent of past ages, all the highest sanctities and virtues of humanity.

These disturbing words—and this habit of mind among 19th-century Englishmen—are the context in which the legacy of Trafalgar and the death of Nelson are to be understood. The great and dreadful victory at sea on 21 October
1805 played itself out in the mind of Englishmen as a near-perfect example of violent moral theatre whose sublime beauty relied on its distance and its dreadfulness. It became for them a form of battle-arcadia, a place in which the ordinariness, the disappointments and the compromises of everyday life were somehow absent. The fact that Wordsworth, de Quincey and Ruskin, like the majority of 19thcentury Englishmen, had never been near a war was central to their beautiful conception of it. Neither they nor their audiences had any idea what it was like.

This understanding of war lasted, at full strength, until the shock of the trenches. It is the received idea of Trafalgar, of Romantic Battle, which infuses, for example, a letter written by a young British lieutenant, Alexander Gillespie, on the evening before his company went into the attack at Loos on the Western Front in 1915.

My dear Daddy,

Before long I think we shall be in the thick of it, for if we do attack, my company will be one of those in front, and I am likely to lead it…It will be a great fight, and even when I think of you, I would not wish to be out of this. You remember Wordsworth's ‘Happy Warrior':

Who if he be called upon to face

Some awful moment to which Heaven has joined

Great issues, good or bad, for human kind,

Is happy as a lover, and attired

With sudden brightness like a man inspired.

Well, I could never be all that a happy warrior should be, but it will please you to know that I am very happy, and whatever happens, you will remember that…

Always your loving

Bey.

Poor Gillespie knew only what the tradition of Romantic Battle, with its roots not exactly in Trafalgar but in the received idea of Trafalgar, had taught him. Only with the mass exposure of Englishmen to the humiliating and nauseating realities of battle could such a conception begin to die. Then the vision was replaced by something like this, lines written by Wilfred Owen:

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues.

In the hands of Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, war came to be seen not as a shrine to innocence, but as its destroyer. The shadow, or perhaps the light of Trafalgar, with its halo of courage, beauty and honour, its powerful and Elysian idea of the Happy Warrior, lasted only until the killing fields of industrial war.

The 19th century had chosen to remember only the Happy Warrior; the 20th century only ‘the blood come gargling.' Both are essential to any understanding of Trafalgar: the uncompromising violence; the dedicated grip on the need for ‘annihilation'; the seeking of victory through exsanguination; combined with a hunger for honour; a belief in the reality of noble ideas; self-possession as a mark of nobility; and behind all that a tender and active humanity. However reluctant people have become to describe battle in this way, these are the ambivalent ingredients of sublime and noble war, of a kind which Homer and Virgil would have recognised, and all of which were undeniably there on 21 October 1805. It was a brutal amalgam and remains an inheritance with a troubling moral ambiguity at its heart.

MANUSCRIPTS

N
ATIONAL
A
RCHIVES
, K
EW

A
DM
iralty In Letter Book, Mediterranean Station, May-December 1805 A
DM
/1/411

B
UCKINGHAMSHIRE
C
OUNTY
R
ECORD
O
FFICE

Fremantle Papers

Swanbourne inventory d/fr/41/6

Rice contretemps d/fr/31/5

Post-Trafalgar strategic situation 1807 d/fr/32/2/1

B
EDFORDSHIRE
C
OUNTY
R
ECORD
O
FFICE

Bayntun papers

Out Letter book 1799-1800 x170/4/1

Leviathan's Rough Log Book for 1805 x 170/1/2

Leviathan's Muster Book for 1805 x 170/2/2

1804 Letter to Bayntun on
Leviathan
warning of gale in Gulf of Cadiz x 170/7/2

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